


ʻŌlelo Alola

by htruona



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: (sighs deeply), Breaking the Fourth Wall, Crack, Duolingo, Gen, Hawaiian, Making Fun Of All The Terrible Names For Things In Pokemon, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, The Perils Of Learning A Foreign Language, Unreliable Narrator, don’t take this seriously, pls
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-08-13 23:31:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20182537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/htruona/pseuds/htruona
Summary: A suggestion from Professor Kukui leads to Ash learning yet another language. Featuring an—erm—overenthusiasticgreen Noctowl; a study in the ridiculous naming of things in the Alola region; and a whole lotta friendship along the way.or: that one fic where Ash learnsHawaiianAlolan. it goes about as well as you’d expect.





	1. It All Begins

**Author's Note:**

> i’m just gonna apologise now for this mess. 
> 
> i mean, i’ve been told it’s pretty good, but i have no idea whether this style of narration works or not. but i had a blast with it! so that’s all that matters

Once upon a time—or more accurately, the tired Tuesday night before Ash _officially_ began his new life of Education and Studying at the Pokémon School—Ash and Professor Kukui were just about to start eating dinner.

But before any of that could happen, Kukui said something over to Ash with a smile. Ash would describe it as ‘something’, and not in words, because Ash actually did not have a singular clue what Kukui had just said.

Ash sent a Confused Look over the table before he could stop himself.

Kukui looked away, faintly awkward. “Oh, that was Alolan,” he said. “I kind of forgot you don’t speak it. I’m used to speaking in both Alolan and Unovian with the people here.”

Ash blinked. “The people here have their own language?”

“Yeah, though it uh,” Kukui frowned, “_fell out of use_ when we were a part of Unova. It’s only in the past few decades we’ve properly tried to revive the language, which is why so much of everything is still in Unovian.”

‘Fell out of use’ was a _kind_ way for Kukui to say ‘Unova banned us speaking the language to the point where almost everyone forgot it and I am very Angry about it’. He had a lot of Feelings about that topic. But he knew it wouldn’t be very good to have a rant—ahem, _passionate speech_—about why it was completely and undeniably immoral to invade a region and ban their native language, customs and culture, so Kukui just decided to leave his message at that and have that conversation another time.

It wouldn’t do very well to scare the kid away within 10 hours of meeting him, after all. 

Kukui instead continued what he was saying . “You won’t be expected to learn Alolan or anything like that, so don’t wo—”

“But can I though?!” Ash cut Kukui off, dinner cruelly abandoned for the conversation, with an excitement on his face so bright Kukui almost expected him to burst into a ball of light any second. Almost, key word, because that was a metaphor and logically would never happen. 

Only when Ash sheepishly sat down (Kukui questioned himself when he stood up in the first place) did Kukui realise he’d been silent.

“Sorry, I just get really excited about learning languages. I only know three,”—_only three?_ Kukui wondered in shock, because knowing three languages was not something to be preceded by ‘only’—“but they’re so fun to learn!”

Kukui, lost somewhere in the revelation that the 12-year-old kid in front of him was trilingual, stared blankly ahead for a moment. 

(Well, maybe Ash wasn’t twelve, but Kukui didn’t know that. Ash at the very least _looked_ twelve. And that fact was all pretty much anyone had to base Ash’s age off of—some vague accident, maybe that thing where he saw Ho-oh or something to do with the six times he’d died or maybe even that one time he’d time travelled somehow froze his age and twisted it all up like a bunch of metal chain necklaces hopelessly knotted together, the truth of it lost somewhere in all the tangles to the point where not even _Ash_ knew his own age, really.)

(But that was another story. It was, coincidentally, also one which a single search on this cursed website could easily find so the author wasn’t going to bother telling it. For now, anyway.)

In some unspecified time during the narrator’s hopeless rambling, Kukui realised himself and began talking again. Like a functional human being. Which nobody in this entire plot line, not even the author who created it, could be referred to as—hence why the word ‘like’ was used instead of one of the many conjugations of the verb ‘to be’ so as to not possibly insinuate that a character was a Functioning Person.

“Of course you can! I think I still have some of Burnet’s old textbooks somewhere…” he muttered. 

Ash, once again, was Lost by Kukui saying things which he had no clue of the meaning to. So, once again, Kukui got hit dead on with the same Confused Look of not five minutes earlier.

“Oh! Burnet is an, uh,” Kukui… blushed? “old friend.”

“Ah,” Ash said in understanding while not understanding at all.

Being a twelve(??)-year-old, Ash as of yet Did Not Understand the powers of romance and love and as such thought it was Weird that adults and teenagers and Brock, mostly Brock, always swooned over people that were even vaguely nice to look at. But Ash didn’t mention it, because Iris (and a lot of other people too, but Iris stood out) always said that he _should_ understand it, which was fine except for the undeniable part where he did not, and his repeated attempts to try to understand it all only resulted in him being even more confused than before except now unable to ask for guidance on the subject out of an unwillingness to be ridiculed again.

This is a Thing which would be touched upon had this piece of classic literature come under the genre of ‘slice-of-life where Kukui aggressively parents Ash’. However, since the genre is more accurately defined—the word ‘accurately’ is used loosely because the author isn’t _quite_ sure where this story is going yet—as ‘Ash learns <strike>Hawaiian</strike> Alolan while we all laugh at the jokes in the story, provided the author actually lands them, no pressure’, this topic will once again Not Be Covered. For now, anyway.

“I’ll get her books from the basement tonight.”

—

True to Kukui’s word, several well-loved textbooks appeared in the loft which was now Ash’s bedroom about an hour before Ash was supposed to go to bed.

However. When faced with a crossroad, where one, sensible path represented ‘sleep’ and the other represented ‘learning another language’, Ash didn’t even think before completely forgoing the sensible option. This was for several reasons: 1) Ash generally completely ignored the sensible option in most situations, deciding immediately on the most chaotic and grey-hair-inducing (for everyone around him) option, and; b) Ash just really, really liked to learn new languages.

“I mean,” Ash had gushed to Clemont in Kalosian, ignoring Clemont’s winces at the grammatical mistakes (because in his defence he had only been learning Kalosian for, like, two months, and he thought he was doing pretty well), “isn’t it all just _so cool_! How the way people speak is just so different, but at the same time it’s really similar, and you’ve got all these little phrases in each language that can’t really be translated because they’re things that are only really _in_ that one region, and—”

Ash hadn’t been cut off after that. In actual fact, he continued that near incomprehensible gushing for another five minutes, going on and on about how insane it was that people in completely different places managed to obtain extremely similar features of language without any sort of coordination, but Clemont just stopped listening and went back to building his latest invention. Which blew up in his face an hour later. But that’s irrelevant. 

So, back to the actual story. Ash opened the textbook and went immediately to the first chapter—titled, nicely enough, ‘Alola’. 

Ash, a fool, thought, _hey! I know this one—it means ‘hello’!_

And the textbook, devilish and evil and full of trickery, replied, _ha bitch you thought_.

So concluded the story of Ash learning that ‘alola’ did not, in fact, mean ‘hello’. It actually meant ‘love’. And, in an explanation that was far too technical for beginners of a language, the book also explained that the word ‘alola’ could be used in several ways.

These ways included: as a noun or verb, meaning ‘love’; as a greeting, either ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’, generally the most common usage heard (but keeping the previous definition in mind, this was more accurately a reminder of love than a simple greeting); a rather complex system of beliefs which boiled down to a simple yet powerful idea of respecting and caring for everyone around you, and finally; just plain referring to the region itself.

Ash thought the many meanings of ‘alola’ were great. Wonderful, actually. But this complexity was most definitely _ not _the first thing Ash needed to find out about the language he was about to learn, and he was beginning to regret not just going to sleep an hour ago.

—

There was a well-known legend in the Alola region.

One day, many many years ago, a Man followed destiny and was brought to an island. 

The Guardian of the island showed themselves to Him, and the Man looked at them, yellow as lightning and the morning sun, and He said: “I seeeth thou. Thine land in thou ocean shalt henceforth be namenth ‘Yellow Island’.”

The Guardian trilled in approval, and the Man followed destiny to the next isle.

Once again, the Guardian showed themselves to him. The Man looked at them, purple as the ocean at the peak of dusk, and said: “I knoweth now. Thine island shalt from thise day onwords be knoweth as ‘Purple Island’.”

The Guardian nodded their approval, and the Man followed destiny to the third isle.

Upon arriving, the Man was once again greeted (loved) by the Guardian of the Isle. And the Man looked upon them, red as—wait, isn’t this the _plant_ Guardian? Shouldn’t they be _green_?—uh, the roses as they bloom in fields of endless grass? Wait, no, that’s still kind of green. Ah well. And the Man said: “From now thise is trueth. Thine home shalt forever more beeth called ‘Red Island’.”

The Guardian showed their approval, and the Man moveth on, following destiny to the last island.

The Guardian of the last island showed themselves to Him, and the Man set His sight upon them, pink as… well, psychic energy had to be given _a_ colour, right? And He said: “I understandeth now. Thine island shalt be giveth the name ‘Pink Island’.”

As with all old legends, they meant nothing unless they had some inexplicable connection to the present timeline. By ‘inexplicable’, the narrator means ‘only possible through the precise planning of an author’. Or of a God. Those words were, generally, synonymous anyway.

So in order to show this magical connection we must pay a visit to a certain classroom on a certain island, where a child of ambiguous age was focused solely on a textbook while the rest of the class engaged in a lesson on a language he already knew. 

(That was Kantonian. Kukui had decided to let Ash self-study Alolan while he taught the rest of the class Kantonian, because he figured there was no point having Ash actually take part in that class, considering Kantonian was Ash’s entire native language.)

Ash had finished wrapping his head around the confusing section titled ‘Alola’, and had moved on to the ‘colours’ part of the book. Which was, thankfully, much nicer.

_Melemele — yellow_  
_ ʻUlaʻula — red _

Ash paused. Those words were strangely familiar to him, and he didn’t know why.

He kept reading.

_ Akala — pink _  
_ Poni — purple _

He stared at it, confused, until it all clicked into place and there was nothing reasonable to do except slam his head roughly into the desk in disappointment. 

The class went silent. For all of one moment, anyway, until it became too unbearable for Sophocles to bear and he burst out with: “Are you okay?”

Ash inhaled deeply. And dramatically, but nobody tell him that. Then he exhaled, equally deeply and dramatically, before widely gesturing and asking, “Who named it _yellow island_?”

Lana let her lips slide into a grin, unable to stop herself beginning the story. “See, once upon a time there was a Man—”

“No, there wasn’t,” Mallow corrected. She turned to Ash. “Nobody really knows who named the islands after colours.”

Oh, sorry, did the author say this story was well-known? She lied. She made it up on the spot.

—

“Say, Ash, are you learning Alolan on Duolingo too?” Lillie asked once class was over.

She said this with a perfectly innocent tone, but beneath there was a barely concealed ruthlessness. The rest of the class froze, and Lillie internally smirked, confident in the fact that she had drawn another unsuspecting person into the wrath of the green Noctowl.

Ah, how sweet life was. She couldn’t _wait_ to crush another person in the weekly rankings.

“What’s Duolingo?” Ash asked, painfully ignorant of the pain that lay in wait.

“It’s an app where we all get voluntarily harassed by a green Noctowl into learning a new language,” Mallow said, before shivering violently. It was a good thing Kukui wasn’t there, because had he overheard this conversation he would have been Very Concerned about the overall well-being of these children.

“It’s fun, really! You should download it!” Lillie said and reached for Ash’s phone and going straight into the App Store to search it up. A few seconds later, Ash’s phone was handed back to him, the painfully bare home screen containing One New App.

(Sophocles had gotten a glimpse at how empty Ash’s phone was, with the default background and no apps beyond the pre-downloaded ones, and immediately felt a lone tear run down his cheek. Really, he thought, how could one be so cruel as to not even _personalise_ a phone? Even _Kiawe_ had a custom profile picture—one of him and his little sister—so Sophocles Did Not Understand how Ash, the kid who duelled Tapu Koko, like, yesterday, hadn’t figured out the setting to change the background.)

(In Ash’s defence, since the author would’ve felt bad if she didn’t explain all sides of the issue, he had only owned the phone for a week after his mother had Freaked Out about all the Things that happened in Kalos (and the supreme lack of contact from Ash to, well, anyone) and so had finally forced him along to a shop and bought him a phone, in the hopes that her ridiculous child would finally learn to communicate with _someone._)

“It is _not fun_,” Kiawe pointed out in protest to Lillie’s declarations. “I keep losing my streak! And then Duo keeps sending me emails with sad faces, saying I’ve made it feel bad, and then _I_ feel bad and I’ve gotta get back into it even if I don’t want to but I’m always too busy so I can never keep it up. Then the same thing happens all over again!”

“It’s manipulation,” Lana said in a cold voice, “manipulation in its finest form. It’s taking advantage of all our naturally kind and caring natures and _ exploiting _them for its own capitalistic profit.”

Sophocles frowned. “Your nature isn’t ‘kind and caring’ enough to be moved by Duolingo’s sadness. And it’s free, anyway, so it doesn’t take any money from you unless you’re Lillie and you feel the need to buy Duolingo Plus.”

“It means I can get all the lessons offline!” Lillie objected. Everyone ignored her. 

During all of this arguing, Ash had opened the app and began creating a new account. He put in his email—frowning at the reminder of how his mother hadn’t let him choose ‘pokemonmaster’ for the first part of his email and had instead been forced into ‘satoshiaketchum’—and typed ‘Ash’ into the username box. 

The box lit up red and told him to choose another name.

“What do you _mean_ I can’t be Ash, I _am_ Ash,” he muttered in frustration. Pikachu, just now being edited in by the author (you’ll understand in about 700 words!), snickered slightly and refused to try explain to Ash what he was doing wrong.

There was what one may call a misunderstanding between Ash and Duolingo at this point. When Duolingo said ‘please choose another name’, it meant that ‘someone has already taken this username and we require everyone who registers to have a unique username because that is how we identify people’. However, when Ash saw ‘please choose another name’, he immediately drew the conclusion that Duolingo was saying ‘hi, sorry, your real life name can’t be Ash so you have to change it if you want to sign up’.

The arguing continued. So did Ash’s glare at his phone.

Had Misty been here, she would have taken one look at Ash and laughed at him for being extremely out-of-touch with all technology outside of pokédexes and those calling machines found in pokémon centres, then Ash would’ve frowned playfully at her, and Misty would after several minutes finally taken pity on him and showed him how to do what he wanted to do.

But Misty wasn’t here.

Eventually, Mallow, who was not quite as invested in the discussion as everyone else but was rather more content in providing small comments every now and again, filled Misty’s role and took pity on Ash, scooting her seat over to see what was wrong. 

“It’s not letting me choose Ash as a name,” Ash explained.

Mallow smiled in amusement. “That’s because it’s a _username_, and it has to be different to all the names everyone else has signed up with.”

_ Oh_, Ash realised dumbly. It was like the email his mother had forced him into making. He blinked. “Oh. What should I make it then?”

“Anything you want.”

Ash gently placed the phone down as if it symbolised centuries of hardship and one wrong move would immediately destroy the universe. “This is so much pressure,” he said, before turning to everyone else and raising his voice. “Guys! What should my username be!”

The passionate argument stopped immediately, suggesting that perhaps it was not quite as passionate as one may think. 

“Well, I just made mine ‘Kiawe’ with a bunch of numbers after it,” Kiawe said.

Sophocles frowned in distaste. “Coward.”

“You could be ‘PokemonMaster’!” Lillie suggested.

Ash considered it. “That’s nice, but I tried that with my email and my mum didn’t like it and I don’t like making her feel bad.”

It wasn’t that his mum didn’t _like _it, per se. Just she thought it was rather unprofessional for an email. That reasoning would, therefore, not transfer to the choosing of a Duolingo username, but Ash (a dumbass in the field of all things common-sensical) did not realise that and so didn’t choose PokemonMaster as a username.

“I made mine ‘ruleroftheseas’,” Lana said.

“Mine is ‘lils’!” Lillie proudly announced.

Sophocles looked at her in a strange concoction of disbelief and awe. Well, thinking about it, the combination wasn’t actually that strange—supposing that something is particularly awe-inspiring, the reason for it _being _awe-inspiring generally would have something to do with how few people manage to pull off the feat, therefore making it unbelievable that it would actually happen—and the author is going to shut up with her rambling and continue with the story now. 

“Yeah, Lillie somehow managed to get her username to be her nickname, even though her name is much more common than any of ours, and whenever I try to get the username ‘sophocles’ or even ‘sophy’ it’s always taken,” he explained. “Actually, me and Lana have a conspiracy theo—”

Lana firmly slammed her hand over Sophocles’ mouth. “We do not _ speak _of such matters in front of these… _unworthy people_,” she hissed.

Naturally, not a word of this was true. Lana just really liked to mess with people, and everyone _knew _that Lana just really liked to mess with people, yet every time she attempted to pull something of this manner off, she executed it with such believability that nobody really knew whether she was joking or not for at least a small moment.

Unbeknownst to any of the conversing children, Pikachu—who the author most definitely did not forget to write in this scene (she’s even going to edit in a mention earlier on to prove it!)—had picked up Ash’s phone and was typing in, clumsily, what he believed was the best name.

All of the other fields had been filled out. This was the last one.

And so, with an evil smirk on his face, Pikachu typed ‘AshyBoi’ as the username and created the account before Ash had any idea what had happened. He knew Ash would despise it. Ash _hated _that nickname, and even though Pikachu had pretty much fully warmed to his trainer, there was still a hint of mischievousness from the first time they met that stayed as stubbornly in his personality as his love for ketchup.

The poor fool. It was truly a shame that Ash didn’t know a thing about technology and so wouldn’t be able to change the name, otherwise Pikachu wouldn’t be able to get the full delight from his own actions. 

“You should do ‘GottaBefriendEmAll’!” Mallow suggested, “You know, like that phrase that goes ‘gotta catch em all’, but since you just make friends with all the pokémon instead of trying to catch them.”

Ash had no idea whether he had just been complimented or offended. But, thinking strongly about that entire deal with Paul, he was going to take it as a compliment since his tried-and-trusted method of either adopting pokémon or having them adopt _him _hadn’t failed him yet. Apart from in those first few (many) battles against Paul where he lost. But, he won in the end, so he wasn’t thinking about that.

“Sounds cool!” Ash said. “I like that one the most!”

Mallow beamed. Kiawe frowned. “That’s the only suggestion you’ve had so far,” he pointed out.

Ash shrugged as if that was irrelevant. Which, to him, it was.

Ash picked up his phone to type it in, not questioning how it had suspiciously slid half a ruler’s length to the left, but recoiled in surprise when he saw the ‘Account Creation’ screen had disappeared, instead replaced with a bunch of grey circles labelled with different symbols and a purple one at the top, called ‘Intro’.

“The thingy is gone,” Ash said.

“Huh?” Mallow said. She took the phone from his hands, and unlike literally every other young person on the planet who was ridiculously protective of their phones, Ash let her without any issue. “So it is.”

She messed with the app a little, and a few taps later, she was holding out a settings page—showing proudly at the top Ash’s nice, new, shiny username.

_AshyBoi_.

Ash inhaled, very sharply, and turned to stare at Pikachu with only a tiny hint of betrayal. Okay, perhaps it was more than a little, but Ash wasn’t particularly willing to admit that. 

Pikachu couldn’t hold it in any longer. He doubled over laughing, almost falling off the table he had sat on and sending poor Lillie, who was standing next to said table, flying away as he struggled to keep himself upright. 

“_Why_,” Ash asked. Later, he would fervently deny that his voice broke.

“What’s—What’s AshyBoi? An old nickname?” Sophocles asked.

Ash nodded, tightening his lips and accepting his fate. “My old rival, Gary—we’re kinda friends now but he’s still a jerk, he always will be—he used to call me that. It was so _annoying_, especially since we grew up together and he’s been using it my whole life.”

Sophocles, without a trace of sympathy, laughed. 

Lillie, however, frowned, because there was something extremely familiar about that. Then it clicked. “You grew up in Pallet Town, right?”

“Yeah,” Ash confirmed.

(“How did she _remember_ that?” Sophocles asked.

“He mentions it at least once per day,” Kiawe said drily, “It’s pretty easy to remember.”)

Lillie’s eyes sparkled in the way only a fangirl’s (or fanboy’s, this fanfiction may be completely crack but at least it’s gender-equal) did when they were about to meet their favourite actor. “You mean Professor Gary Oak?! The guy who’s already revolutionised the field of fossil research even though he’s only a little older than us?!”

Lana looked at Lillie, slightly intimidated. 

“Who’s Gary Oak?” Mallow asked, clueless. 

Sophocles sent her a betrayed glare. “Professor Oak’s grandson?”

Realisation dawned in Mallow’s eyes. “Oh! Our principal’s first cousin twice removed! Gotcha,” she said, as if her words hadn’t obliterated three of her classmates on the spot. 

The reason for those three classmates’ obliteration could be split into two near categories. First, there was Lillie and Sophocles—whose prides as aspiring scientists and/or researchers (those were essentially the same thing, but don’t tell them that) were deeply hurt because they had studied both Professor _Gary_ Oak’s and _Samuel_ Oak’s works in far too much detail for either of them to be recognised not for their achievements, but rather for the relation to the school principal who makes far too many bad puns to be taken seriously.

Second, there was Ash, who took great delight in Mallow’s words and fully intended to refer to Gary as nothing other than ‘the principal’s distant cousin’. In fact, he was definitely changing Gary’s contact name to that. (If he could figure out _how _to do that. He had heard that was a thing that could be done, Dawn was always going on about her ever-changing nicknames for all her friends on her phone, but Ash didn’t actually know how it worked. He’d ask her later.)

Mallow rolled her eyes playfully at her classmates’ shock. Lillie and Sophocles glared at her—Sophocles definitely didn't do it out of any real anger, but Lillie’s glare was too foreign on her face for anyone to be sure of whether it was genuine or not—and Mallow lightly shoved them on their shoulders to snap them out of it.

She pulled out her phone. 

“Now you’ve gotta add us all!” Mallow said, cheerfully thrusting her phone—open to her Duolingo profile, showing her username—in front of Ash.


	2. It All Continues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ash freaks out over Lillie’s _insane_ Duolingo score; Kiawe gets Quite Mad; and Kukui has a few regrets, including but not limited to, being born with his own name.
> 
> Oh— Team Rocket shows up too, I guess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI CAN I GIVE A BIG MASSIVE THANKS TO ALL OF YALL WHO GAVE ME S O M U C H L O V E LAST CHAPTER AND EVERY TIME YOU GUYS COMMENTED I WAS LIKE “AHHHH” AND EVERYTIME I GOT KUDOS I WAS LIKE “AHHHHH” I LOVE YOU GUYS SO MUCH!!!!! :DDD

Later, Ash would be exploring all the parts of the Duolingo app, come across the ‘friends’ section, and blanch. 

_lils — 64829 XP — 1849 day streak_  
_sophocles — 4695 XP — 36 day streak_  
_lana — 3400 XP — 45 day streak_  
_mallow — 2987 XP — 1 day streak_  
_kiawe — 965 XP — 0 day streak_  
_ash — 0 XP — 0 day streak_

He stared at it blankly. He kept staring at it blankly, for such a long period of time in fact that Kukui got worried like the father that he was _not_, as he would insist (but we all know that isn’t true!), and climbed up the ladder to find out why exactly Ash was being so quiet. 

“Ash?” Kukui asked, the words barely making their way through the haze of Ash’s mind.

Ash had only one thing to say. “What the heck.”

(Pikachu had been convincing Ash to start swearing For Realsies ever since he was 10. It had yet to work.)

—

On a normal day, everyone would arrive at the class in a generally consistent order.

Lillie would be first. She always asked Hobbes to drive her to school early, relishing in the feeling of productivity that came with being in class long before it actually started.

Mallow and Lana would be next. Most days, they walked together to school—Lana meeting Mallow at her family’s restaurant and walking the rest of the way from there, since Lana would have to pass the restaurant anyway—and as such, arrived together. Shockingly. Author does not know why she specified that Mallow and Lana both walked together and arrived at their destination together, since it had been implied that that had happened anyway; in most cases, walking partners didn’t spontaneously ditch their friend before arriving. 

Sometime during Lillie, Mallow and Lana’s conversations, Sophocles would walk in, his breakfast in one hand and a tub of freshly-baked malasadas in the other, given to him by his mother. His mother had all but forced him into taking them to school, saying, “give them to all your friends, dear, and make sure they take as many as they like!”

We all need a mother in our lives like Sophocles’ mother. 

The four of them would dig into the malasadas, taking about various subjects ranging from the day’s lessons, to Sophocles’ latest inventions, to Mallow and Lana complaining about maths (yes, plural, because the author is British, thank you very much) to complaining about science, to complaining about pretty much all the subjects they did because That’s Just What Students Do.

(Author has just realised that by saying ‘thank you very much’ she has just strengthened the exact stereotypes about British people she hates so much. Whoops.)

10 minutes before the bell rang, Kiawe would stroll in—hair tousled and knotted and horrible from flying across the whole region that morning—at which point Sophocles would offer him a malasada and Mallow would offer him a hairbrush. Kiawe accepted the former and ignored the latter, preferring to fix his hair by finger-combing it. 

That was something that made Mallow Very Mad. Nobody appreciated the effort she put into her hair every morning. Nobody except Lillie appreciated the effort that went into keeping hair neat and tidy full stop—none of the boys apart from maybe Sophocles even _looked_ at their hair in the morning and Lana gave it a quick brush and called it a day. But Mallow had to spend at least twenty minutes every morning getting it to sit _just right_. 

So yes, Kiawe forgoing the offer of a hairbrush was something that rather irritated Mallow. In a friendly way, though, because she’d never let something like that get in the way of their relationship. But still.

(What Mallow would do to just go at Kiawe’s or Ash’s hair with some good conditioner or a hairbrush—)

Finally, Ash would come barrelling into the class, out of breath from sprinting the whole way to school, anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes after Kiawe. It would be useful to note that Kiawe’s arrival time had been described as ‘10 minutes before the bell rang’—meaning that, on the days where he arrived 15 minutes after Kiawe, Ash was in fact late.

Yet somehow Ash never managed to be _marked_ late. Professor Kukui would always seamlessly stroll into class a few minutes after Ash did, and because Kukui would take register when he started class and all students were present, never was anyone (Ash) _technically_ late. Even when they (Ash) showed up after the official school start time.

(Sophocles was Definitely Suspicious about this. Professor Kukui had almost always began class early before Ash joined the school—a few minutes before the bell rang, generally. So the sudden shift from generally beginning early to generally beginning late was… curious. Not that Sophocles really cared either way, but it was a curious thing to note.)

A particularly observant reader may have noticed the repeated use of the conditional tense, and for those who haven’t spent the last many years learning various grammar terms for various language subjects, that would be the repeated use of ‘would’. This would (hah) bring an effect as such: “the repetition of ‘would’ throughout the scene shows the reader that these set of events are not actually set in stone—they are a representation of what _normally_ happens and as such vary on a day-to-day basis, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in large ways.”

Today just so happened to be a day in which this general series of events varied in a large way. 

To begin, Lillie did not actually arrive first today. She was at home, eating a celebratory breakfast with Hobbes to mark the occasion of her finally overcoming her fear and touching the pokémon egg. 

That left Mallow and Lana to arrive first. They walked into class, expecting to see Lillie—but were taken aback on the grounds of her not being there. Nevertheless, they sat down and continued their daily routine of Sitting And Chatting while they waited for everyone else to arrive.

Sophocles came next, breakfast in one hand and freshly-baked malasadas in the other. A quick glance around the room told Sophocles that Lillie was nowhere to be found, and he sent Lana a curious look before shooting off a text to Lillie.

_where are you?_ Sophocles’ text read.

Three minutes later, Lillie replied, _Hobbes made me a celebratory breakfast! I’ll be a little late today._

(By ‘late’, Lillie did, of course, not mean arriving at school after it officially started. Her definition of late fell much more along the lines of ‘any longer than 10 minutes before the agreed beginning time’. So if, for example, both Lillie and Ash arrived with Kiawe—10 minutes before school began—Lillie would be late by her own standards, and Ash early by his.)

Sophocles shared the text with Lana and Mallow, who nodded and continued with their conversation. 

At 8:20am, around half an hour before school began—and the author is using her own non-American school as reference since in her not-so-humble opinion American school starting times are nothing less than completely insane—Sophocles expected nobody else to arrive for at least 15 minutes, if Kiawe was early.

That turned out not to be the case. 

With a massive _slam_, the door to the classroom burst open and in ran Ash, panting from evidently having sprinted the entire way to school. Poor Pikachu looked as if he was about to die on the spot. Rotom seemed delighted by Ash’s new passion for timekeeping, and being able to fly, was unbothered by the speed at which Ash had likely ran. 

“Ash,” Mallow started, placing her almost-finished malasada on the desk and allowing herself a smile at Ash being, well, Ash, “you know you’re not late, right? You didn’t have to run here…”

Ash wheezed, looked around the room, and completely ignored Mallow. “Wait— Lillie isn’t here? I ran all that way for nothing?”

Sophocles explained why Lillie wasn’t present and Ash let out a scream of frustration. Pikachu looked delighted at Ash’s feelings—elation which, understanding that Ash had just forced Pikachu to run for over 10 minutes straight at full speed when they weren’t even late, was _entirely justified_. (If Pikachu didn’t get extra ketchup tonight then somebody was getting Thunderbolted.)

“Why do you need to see Lillie?” Lana asked.

Ash sighed, collapsing into a chair. He frowned childishly—Mallow couldn’t help but relate his facial expression to >:(.

He stayed silent for a moment, contemplating Very Serious Matters in his head. He chewed on his lip and furrowed his eyebrows as he thought it over. Within his head there was a war—one dark and despairing and desperate on both sides, a battle fierce and ruthless between the part of him that wanted to share the reason he needed to see Lillie, and the part of him that was vehement on keeping it quiet.

On and on the clashes continued. One argument after another made itself known in his head, convincing him from one side to the other back and forth and back and—

“That’s an intense glare. You okay?” Lana asked.

Ash shoved his raging thoughts aside, sheepish now he knew he had been glaring.

“Yeah. Sorry. What?” Ash asked.

“We were asking you why you had to see Lillie—”

“—But if you don’t wanna answer, that’s fine! Completely valid.” Mallow jumped in.

“Oh,” Ash realised. At once the air become heavy again. “I… need to ask her something. Something very important. Something that only _she_ can tell me.”

_Yes_, Ash thought. He had likened her to an eldritch god on this matter—all-knowing and powerful and absolutely Not To Be Trifled With Under Any Circumstances, not even life or death. Because trifling with her on this matter _ was _ death, as far as Ash was concerned.

(Actual Death, that was, not the fake ‘death’ he had experienced anywhere from 5–10 times in his life.)

“Oooh,” Sophocles sing-songed, his insatiable need for the _Tea_(™) (_this fanfic is gonna age so badly_, the Author suddenly realised, yet she did not care) jumping to the surface and demanding its daily fill. “What about?”

Ash froze. Should he risk being smited on the spot and spill the tea?

Perhaps yes. On one hand, he liked to share everything with his friends—especially after that Whole Thing In Kalos That Wasn’t So Good—so hiding this from them was not a fun experience. On the other hand, the Author really liked to use long pauses and description for dramatic effect. Well, actually, she just really liked to be dramatic in general.

Ash inhaled deeply, deciding that the Author’s opinions were irrelevant, and steeled himself.

“I need to know the secrets of Duolingo,” he said, voice low and heavy with the weight of the sins of the world, “and only Lillie can tell me what they are.”

—

“Did we all bring something?” Mallow asked. She was, of course, referring to her message on their group chat yesterday saying _BRING A LIGHT SOURCE TOMORROW AN DBE HERE EALRY_, and to Ash’s prompt questioning of _Why are we doing this_, Mallow sent a single (1) backwards smiley face in return. _(:_

Sophocles had followed with his own backwards smiley face, and from there Ash had vastly misinterpreted the signals and began to send all sorts of smiley faces from his Kantonian keyboard (☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆ was a favourite of the author). After that the conversation had wildly strayed off its original path.

“Yeah!” Ash cheered. 

“Let’s go then!”

“Yeah!” Ash cheered, again, then promptly realised that he didn’t know something important: “What are we doing?”

Lillie dug through her bag and pulled out a couple of boxes of fairy lights. “We’re hanging lights all around the classroom!”

“Okay!” Ash grinned. For some reason, this Pure Child(™) did not think to ask why they were doing this.

Around the class, everyone was pulling out individual sources of light. Sophocles had brought in a set of many christmas lights; Kiawe had brought in a collection of lamps, each with very individual lamp shades (including, most notably, one covered in disney princesses that the Author wasn’t entirely sure belonged to Mimo and not Kiawe); Mallow had brought in some candles; and Lana had somehow found two jack-o-lanterns even though it was the middle of May. May 16th, in fact. 

Ash saw everyone pulling out their light sources, grinned, and threw his bag off his shoulder and onto the table so he could lift his own stuff out.

It landed with a thud. The classroom stilled.

Ash pulled out everything he had managed to bring: three lamps, four torches, two boxes of Christmas tree lights, seven small adhesive circular lights that automatically switched on as people walked past, and a collection of lightbulbs from around the house. 

“Ash,” Lana asked, being the only one brave enough to break the silence, “how did you carry all that?”

Ash looked at her weirdly. “Why wouldn’t I be able to?”

“I’m pretty sure you almost broke your desk setting that bag down,” Sophocles stated. “That’s really heavy. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, promise! I mean, it’s not any heavier than that Larvitar I carried about for half of Johto, so…”

Lillie recalled that Larvitar, on average, weighed 72kg. She wasn’t sure what to think of that. 

“Ash, please come help at the farm one day,” Kiawe pleaded. “Please.”

“Oh, you have a farm! That’s so cool!” Ash exclaimed, completely missing the point. 

(The point was much less of ‘Kiawe genuinely wants Ash to help at the farm’, like Ash assumed—but still chose to focus only on the farm aspect—and much more of ‘what the hell, Ash—just— _how_?’)

Sophocles ripped open the box of Christmas lights. “Let’s get started!” he said.

“Hell yeah!” Mallow cheered. “This place is gonna look like the lighting section of IKEA multiplied by a heck ton when we’re done with it.”

—

Professor Kukui took one look in the room and stopped. 

His entire will to live drained away, replaced with utter and undeniable _doneness_ with these children.

“Really? _Again_?” he exclaimed, taking in the copious decorations in the classroom. He could only wonder how long it took them to do this (and he could almost admire the effort that went into this—almost.) 

“Whatever do you mean, professor?” Sophocles asked as if his desk was not illuminated with an entire box of Christmas lights.

Kukui was— really, just because of his _name_—

(He was gonna abandon his ‘Professor Kukui’ side and live full-time as the Masked Royal at this rate.)

He looked around the classroom. Five more forced innocent faces stared back at him, the children making no notice of the fact that the classroom looked like the lighting section of a home store except a million times worse, since there was no structure to it.

Wait. _Five_ more innocent faces.

“Ash, not you too…”

Kukui just got a confused grin in return.

—

While in the air on the way to Kiawe’s family farm, Kiawe signalled to Ash and pointed to a town down below.

“That’s ʻOhana Town down there!” Kiawe called. He smiled, as if sharing a joke to himself. “It’s the only town on Akala Island, the other two main places are cities!”

Ash grinned. “That’s cool! Is this where your farm is?”

Kiawe shook his head. “It’s not _in_ ʻOhana Town, but it’s really close. Come on!”

—

“—yeah!” Ash exclaimed to the class, fondly remembering his experience at Kiawe’s farm. “Kiawe showed me everywhere! Heahea City, ʻOhana Town—”

“ʻOhana Town?” Sophocles asked. “Isn’t it…”

Lana nodded. “Yeah, it’s Paniola Tow—”

“It's not!” Kiawe shouted. Tears sprang to his eyes, and he shook his head in extreme denial only comparable to the Instagram comments of that one maths question involving order of operations that _never seemed to die_, no matter how many times the answer was proven to be 1 and not 9. Or 9 and not 1. Or both, or none at all. 

If you didn’t understand that reference, you don’t want to.

“Come on,” Mallow said in good-spirit, “just accept that someone changed the town’s name already. Everyone else already has.”

Kiawe stood up forcefully. “But how can I when they changed it from ʻOhana Town to Paniola Town?!”

The class burst out laughing. Well, not Ash—poor Ash was just confused.

“Uh,” Ash interjected, “I’m confused.”

“Oh, sorry!” Mallow said. “I forgot you don’t speak much Alolan.” 

She ignored Ash’s grumbling of “but I’ve completed, like, six Duolingo skills already…”

“You know what ʻohana means, yeah?” Lillie said. Ash nodded—he had already been forced into watching Lilo and Stitch, Kukui’s favourite movie, about six times upon the professor finding out that Ash had never seen it.

Ash grinned. “Family! Family Town, it’s a really nice name.”

Lillie snickered. “A few years ago they changed all the town names for some reason and a lot of people got mad about it…” 

“Especially me,” Kiawe, now sitting back down in his seat, muttered dejectedly.

Sophocles rolled his eyes pointedly in a gesture that screamed _we know_.

“So they changed ʻOhana Town to, uh,” Mallow couldn’t contain a grin. Kiawe groaned in despair. “Cowboy Town.”

Ash blinked. “Wait— it’s— _why_?” 

—

“Why isn’t the Duolingo mascot a Rowlet? Instead of a green Noctowl,” Lana pondered at lunch one day. “Surely that’d make more sense…”

Drums filled the air. A second later, violins joined in time—creating an immediately recognisable tune which never failed to put a smile on the viewer’s face. An epic sense of foreboding descended upon the classroom.

_ “Prepare for trouble, that question’s why we’re here!” _

_ “And make it double, it’s an answer you’d all sure love to hear!” _

Mallow stood up, Steenee standing in front of her, ready to fight. “You guys again? What do you even want?!”

“Let us finish the motto, twerpette!” Jessie shouted. 

“We’re not even here to steal Pikachu today anyway. The author only wrote us in to answer that question,” Meowth said.

“Like we _said_ we were doing not ten seconds ago,” James finished.

The class went silent. The wind blew past, making Jessie’s hair fly beautifully to the side and making James’ fly in his face, forcing him to question why he ever decided that haircut was a good idea. Then he remembered—it was for the Aesthetic.

The class stayed silent for a moment, until Lana’s curiosity overpowered her sense of self-preservation and she spoke up.

“So why isn’t it a Rowlet?”

Team Rocket jumped back into their hot air balloon that nobody was particularly sure they had ever left.

“Joke’s ruined now, twerpette, if we finish it now it won’t land right and it’ll be a horrible experience for everyone,” Jessie explained.

James threw down a rose. “But we’ll be back next chapter to deliver the joke right!”

And off they went, the question unanswered.

—

_3(2)² + 4 = 3(4) + 4 = 20_, the board read.

“Shouldn’t it be 16?” Mallow asked, staring at the board in confusion. She was already confused enough by maths. She didn’t need this in her life.

Professor Kukui jolted, and read back over what he had just written. “Yes, my mistake. Sorry,” he said, then corrected it.

(He did not, in fact, say “just making sure you’re all awake!” or some other variant like literally every other maths teacher did. It’s not funny. Please. Stop.)

“Not very _bright_ today, professor, are you?” Sophocles remarked, snickering. 

Kukui looked like he wanted to melt into the ground. Lana and Mallow couldn’t resist a small smile. Ash—

—Ash was just really confused.

—

Ash was halfway through the ‘weather’ skill on the Duolingo Alolan tree, and he was _outraged_.

So outraged, in fact, that he just had to send a passive aggressive message onto their class’ group chat.

**mostly alolan disaster gang**

Ash: So wela means hot   
Ash: Who decided that the biggest volcano in alola should be called hot volcano!!!

mallow: damn right. like gimme your number i jsut wanna talk.

Ash: But yoi have my number?

sophocles: ((that’s another meme!!!))

Ash: Oh. Whoops

mallow: you’re vlaid hun dont worry

Ash: I’m not sure what you mean by ‘vlaid’ but thanks!

In Ash’s defense, Unovian was Not His First Language. So typos were surprisingly hard for him to understand unless it was obvious, which in this case it was not, since he had no idea of the extensive history of the word ‘valid’ and how any of that applied to their current conversation.

So anyway, ignoring Ash’s repeated failed attempts at understanding modern internet culture—because that’s what travelling <strike>for</strike> <strike>three years</strike> <strike>six years</strike> <strike>twenty years?</strike> since the age of 10 does to a person—we see that a simple misunderstanding between people who did not speak each other’s language has, like so many other places in the world, completely ruined its name.

A Long Long time ago—well, actually, it was only a couple centuries ago, so probably about the time Ash was just beginning his Johto journey—some Unovan explorers ‘discovered’ the region of Alola. 

There they met the native inhabitants of the island. Somehow, the fact that people already lived in the Alola region did not disprove that the region was ‘discovered’ by Unovians, a fact in history books that Should Absolutely be fixed at some point. Preferably a decade ago, but next week would do.

Anyway—and the author is becoming extremely conscious of the repeated off-topic rambles, alongwith the inconsistent tense (and wow look, she goes (went?) again)—when these Unovians explored these curious islands, they came across one particular isle housing a large mountain.

In fact, on further inspection it turned out to not be a mountain. It was a volcano.

So the Unovians became extremely fascinated at this, remembering the massive research that had been carried out in Unova’s Reversal Mountain, and one of them started rapidly scribbling on their makeshift map.

It was at that point that they hit a block. They wondered, as any map-maker should, ‘what is the name of this volcano?’. Because they couldn’t just leave it unnamed and none of them were creative enough to create their own name—the most creative guy in the whole group would have named it something like ‘Electric Mountain’ due to all the electric-type Geodude kicking about.

(The rest of the group had the collective creativity of whoever named all the old Super Mario Kart tracks on the SNES and, well, seeing as the highlights of those names included ‘Donut Plains 3’, ‘Mario Circuit 1’ and ‘Bowser Castle 2’, they were not the people anyone should trust to name a monument.) 

And so they searched. They asked locals for the volcano’s name, but due to the intense differences between their respective languages, all they received were blank stares and awkward interactions. 

Yet they kept asking, and asking. The explorers were certain that the Kahuna cursed them to hell at one point for being general pains despite the language barrier. One of the explorers even asked a Pichu nearby, tempting it with a berry, and only received a “Pi-chu!” in return.

Author did not know what they were expecting.

Eventually, hope was lost. The One Creative Guy of the group was ready to give up, and just call it ‘Electric Mountain’ already, when hope finally appeared in the form of a sign. 

_Wela,_ it read. A warning, meaning ‘hot’, for anyone who was to venture into the volcano.

The explorers did not know this. They saw the sign and assumed, thinking back to the signs in Unova stating the names of all the towns, that this ‘wela’ was the name of the volcano.

They assumed wrong. 

Such were the events leading to the volcano being named ‘Hot Volcano’. Honestly, ‘Electric Mountain’ would have been better.

—

The class kept making jokes about lights when Kukui was around, and Ash had no idea why.

“Really,” he asked Mallow once. Mallow seemed to be the most likely person to actually give him an answer. “Why do you always joke about lights to Kukui?”

Mallow smiled and somehow managed to expertly divert the topic before Ash knew it was even happening, and it wasn’t until five minutes later—when they were deep into a conversation about traditional Kantonian foods—that Ash realised that Mallow had played him.

Ash had been tempted to divert the topic back to Professor Kukui and his lights once he’d realised, but he felt too awkward changing the topic suddenly. No. He’d ask someone else later.

—

“Hey, Lillie,” Ash sing-songed, “why does everyone joke about lights whenever Professor Kukui is around?”

Lillie froze like an adorable little deerling in headlights.

“Uh, I,” Lillie stuttered in reply, “Sorry! I’ve gotta go— need to go home. Now. Can’t stay for conversation, sorry, uh.” 

And just like that, Lillie was gone, and Ash felt too bad to call her out on her obvious lie. He’d ask someone else.

—

“Kiawe?” Ash called. “What was the deal with that whole light thing we did to the classroom? And why do you all keep making jokes about lights?”

Kiawe just shrugged—but not in the way that meant _I don’t know the answer_, but rather _I absolutely know the answer but for reasons I am holding it back from you >:)._

Ash sighed, and decided to ask someone else.

—

“Sophocles,” Ash said. “Please. Why do you all talk about lights all the time. I’m so confused, _help_.”

Sophocles regarded him coolly. “I don’t think I will,” he said, then left, leaving Ash alone to waste away into dust.

—

Mallow. Lillie. Kiawe. Even Sophocles.

Ash had asked everyone in the class about The Light Jokes, and _nobody_ had given him a straight answer. Or any answer at all, really.

That left only one person…

But did he really want to? Was Ash really prepared for the toll that asking this person would take?

Ash swallowed thickly, pushing his apprehension aside. He was desperate now—there was no choice but to ask _her_.

“Lana,” Ash started. She turned around. “Please, I _need_ to know why you all make jokes about lights. If you don’t I’ll be suffering forever.”

Lana glared at him, her gaze piercing into his soul. “Good,” she said. “Then _Suffer_.”

And so Ash did.

—

From that moment a curse befell Ash—and from it he did, in fact, Suffer.

A wild Powder Snow attack from Snowy hit Ash not once, but twice, in the face. He tripped over his own feet at least four times. And, worst of all, he tried to make himself hot chocolate when he went home—but as soon as he tasted it, it tasted nothing like the sweet drink he was used to. It tasted bitter, like a mixture of anger and sadness all rolled up into one Very Displeasing Drink. 

(Much similar to how Galaxy’s new dark chocolate bar tasted, actually, when the Author bought it to cry with watching Endgame. She did, in fact, cry; but not at the film, rather at how that chocolate had the audacity to advertise itself as rich and delicious yet taste exactly like anger feels.)

In the back of his mind, Ash could hear Lana’s faint laughter, ringing in his ears like the echoes of a long past explosion. He was a little bit terrified.

Just a little.

(It was more than a little.)

At the end it all boiled down to the point where Ash had to do _ something _ to shield himself from the pain and the hurt and the Suffering. So, he went on Duolingo.

He’d levelled up all the skills above to five crowns. And, if he was honest with himself, he Did Not Want to talk about the rain in Heahea any longer. 

That left the Household skill untouched. With a grin, Ash opened up the skill and waited for it to load. It wasn’t long before it did, and first question—

_ Which one of these means “the light”? _

And below it were four options: _ke kī, _showing a picture of a key, which Ash registered as being pronounced very similarly to the Unovian word; _ka noho_, showing a chair; _ke kelepona_, showing a picture of a phone; and finally, _ke kukui_, showing a lamp—

—Oh. _Oh._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no angst, aqua. only fluff. >:)
> 
> <strike>also kukui is _technically_ named after a species of tree, but kukui is also the word for lamp in hawaiian. so uh. sorry, professor lamp.</strike>

**Author's Note:**

> ah, duolingo. my old friend. you’re in my fanfic now, just like i promised, please let my family go—


End file.
